311 COVID-19 Testing IWA and Chatbot

About the Program

Category: Information Technology (Best in Category)

Year: 2021

In March 2020, the 311 Contact Center of the Communications and Customer Experience department (CCED) received an increasing volume of resident calls for testing appointment reservations. 311 business analysis showed that roughly two thirds of residents calling for a COVID-19 test at the time did not qualify for an appointment. The Information Technology department (ITD) was tasked to provide a technical solution that deflects unqualified callers and allows for resident self-service on additional channels. A three-phase approach was taken in collaboration with CCED, IBM, Twilio, Avaya, and AT&T to minimize time to market. Phase 1 succeeded at deflecting calls from residents that would not qualify for an appointment through a cloud-based IBM Watson Assistant (IWA) connected to a Twilio provisioned scalable SIP trunk. Phase 2 enabled resident self-service in English and Spanish through a voice to text IWA flow, fully integrated with the 311 service request system (311Hub) and thereby allowed reuse of existing appointment processing, messaging, and reporting facilities. Finally, phase 3 published the text IWA flow from phase 2 as web chatbot on miamidade.gov, providing an additional self-service option to residents seeking COVID-19 testing appointments. Over 38,000 residents utilized the new self-service options.